Stunningly bad science at the EPA

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Quite the scandal rearing its ugly little head - from Rod Adams writing at Atomic Insights:

How Proposed EPA CO2 Rule Rewards States for Replacing Nuclear With Gas
On August 20, 2014, Remy DeVoe, a graduate student in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee, published an earthshaking piece on ANS Nuclear Cafe titled Unintended Anti-Nuclear Consequences Lurking in the EPA Clean Power Plan. Unfortunately, there has been a bit of a delayed reaction; so far, only the most carefully tuned instruments have noticed any movement.

In his article, Remy described how he and Justin Knowles, another UT nuclear engineering graduate student, chose to spend part of their summer in the very “nuclear” activity of digging deeply into a mathematical model to find out the basic assumptions underlying its results. The model they chose was the formula that the EPA has described as a “consistent national formula” for calculating each state’s existing CO2 intensity (CO2 mass per MW-hr) — using 2012 data.

Aside: Please forgive my use of the underline format for a phrase that is not a link. Though underlines generally indicate the existence of a link here on Atomic Insights, I wanted to reproduce the phrase exactly as it appears — including text formatting — on EPA Connect: The Official Blog of EPA’s Leadership in a June 4, 2014 blog post by Janet McCabe titled Understanding State Goals under the Clean Power Plan End Aside.

Remy and Justin entered a hypothetical scenario into the model in which each state with nuclear generating stations shut down all of their nuclear plants and replaced their zero emission electricity generation with natural gas fired generation. Remy and Justin uncovered a starting fact. In 15 states the carbon intensity in pounds per MWhr as calculated by the EPA’s spreadsheet model decreased.

That result made no sense to them. They thought that someone had to have made a mistake somewhere in the formulas used in the model that had not been caught by any of the reviews that must have taken place inside the EPA before the rule was issued for comment.

Much more at the site. The comments are worth reading

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on August 28, 2014 2:28 PM.

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